


agape, adzuki

by chuchisushi



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Cooking, Established Relationship, Food, M/M, Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Unreliable Narrator, a love story in two parts, but for the purposes of the fic baze believes so, idk if jedha was completely wrecked by the death star, pt2 is on the flight to eadu
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-28 09:13:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10084532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chuchisushi/pseuds/chuchisushi
Summary: Food is love.Or: two times Baze makes steamed buns





	

**Author's Note:**

> so something like 2.5 months ago, I told [Arghnon](http://archiveofourown.org/users/arghnon) that I'd write a fic about Baze making pao/baozi as a result of a good ten minutes spent screaming about food. This is said fic (finally).
> 
> thanks as always go to [me brother](http://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus) for his beta. Everyone go wish him better health so he can finally stop using cough syrup.

Chirrut follows his nose to the Temple kitchens like a stray led to food. Baze thinks he’s a nuisance, but even he cannot deny how the edges of the thought have been worn down into softness by familiarity and the passage of time.

Chirrut _is_ a nuisance, though, as much so as he’d been when sighted; he gets underfoot just by poking his nose too-inquisitively into every pot and bowl, heedless of whether or not he gets burnt, and has to be chased away for any work to be done. The other chefs shunt him, by degrees, all the way through the kitchen, through all the noise, to where he fetches up against the counter at Baze’s side.

(Baze, somehow, had been appointed Chirrut’s unofficial minder, somewhat to his chagrin. He had not _asked_ for this troublesome, wiry young man, who laughed too loudly and picked too many fights, who smiled just a hair too broadly and showed just a few too many teeth. He’s trouble, Chirrut is, and Baze had thought there was no room in his regimented life as a devoted Guardian to include him. Chirrut had wormed his way in regardless, loud and forthright and smiling like he knew the punchline to a joke the Force was telling. Baze, somehow, cannot find it within himself to be resentful.)

“Do you intend to make enough pao to feed an army?” Chirrut asks, tone half-incredulous. Baze reaches out and smacks away Chirrut’s reaching hand with his tuber-starch-dusted own without looking up, thwarting Chirrut’s attempt to steal one of the cooked steamed buns.

“I will not succeed in my endeavor if you put all of them in your belly, Chirrut,” Baze answers. Sedately, he spoons another round of meat and vegetables into the leavened dough in his other hand, setting the spoon back into its bowl before starting to deftly fold the wrapping about the filling. He can feel Chirrut scowling at him. Baze steps on his foot when Chirrut tries to steal a different bun while Baze’s hands are occupied.

“ _Baze_ ,” Chirrut whines, defeated; Baze grunts when the other folds against him, leaning all his weight upon his form. Baze spreads his feet a little wider to compensate. Chirrut is not _light_ despite his wiry frame; he’s dense with muscle like most of the Guardians are, and, this close, Baze can feel the warmth of him, can tell that his hair and skin are both damp from either the heat of the kitchen or physical exertion.

“Did you complete the entire set of warm-down kata?” Baze asks him. He sets down the completed bun, peels another piece of dough off of the stack on the cluttered surface of the sandstone counter, fills it. Starts to fold again. Against him, Chirrut starts.

“And they call me Force-touched.” Chirrut scowls. “Do _you_ have a sixth sense for bucking protocol, Baze?” Baze finally glances at Chirrut, gives him a very flat look in return as he sets down another bun, peels off another dough skin, unimpressed by Chirrut’s wit. “I was _hungry_.”

“Which is no-doubt why you’re here, trying to stymie my efforts at creating an army of baozi. Don’t.” He elbows Chirrut this time as the other reaches for a bun. “That was pathetic. I was looking right at it.”

“Well, it’s not as though I could _tell_ , now is it?” Chirrut retorts, and suddenly there’s a vicious edge to his voice, a cruel, pointed spitefulness rooted in frustration. Baze breathes in. Breathes out.

“You can do better,” he tells Chirrut firmly. Sets down another bun. Peels off another round of dough. His voice falls into rhythm, litany, rote as he recites, “The baozi are for the pilgrims and those that seek succor in the Temple. They are good hot or cold, are easy to pass out and eat. They are one way we give back to NiJedha. You know this.” He scrapes the last of the filling out of the bowl. “And your warm-down kata. They are tailored to your health and condition. They play to your strengths. What you’ve found you rely on the most. You are relearning. Undoing the hours of reflex you knew in exchange for something better suited to your refusal to set down your staff. You know this, too.” He puts down the last bun in the batch. Stands with his dusty, callused hands braced against the sandstone countertop for the weight of both Chirrut’s body and regard. “You could have renounced your vows. None would have blamed you. Instead, you insist on the fight.” Chirrut is still and silent against him, and his heat is a tangible thing, the remnants of the internal fire that had been stoked high with exertion, hand-to-hand, the stave.

Baze shifts to flip the lid off of one of the waiting wickerwire steamers, as broad as the span of his arm, a cloud of water vapor rising from it with the action. He dusts his hands again with tuber starch and hefts up the tray of uncooked buns, leaning over the countertop to arrange them within, fingerprint to fingerprint so they won’t stick to each other while cooking. Chirrut stirs, and Baze doesn’t flinch at the ghost of hands against him, across the span of his shoulders, touching the strain of his bicep where he holds the tray. He’s grown used to the way Chirrut is relearning him, matching his other senses to the memory of sight that he once held (because this is certainly not the first time Chirrut had invaded the kitchen looking for a snack while Baze was working). He finds he doesn’t mind it.

“Go on then. Finish your kata and meditate,” Baze tells him. “You’ll still be hungry in an hour.”

“You are the _cruelest_ , Baze,” Chirrut tells him in reply, and Baze smiles, because it’s certainly a sentiment he’d heard before, being one of the Guardians that worked with the children. The novices loved to complain about him.

“Go _away_ , Chirrut,” he returns, and Chirrut sighs loudly right in his ear as though the action of standing upright was equivalent to lapping the breadth of NiJedha.

“Guardian Malbus the merciless, consigning me to my fate of starvation in the name of duty!” Chirrut laments dramatically, certainly loud enough to be heard even over the inherent clamor of the kitchen; Baze rolls his eyes (pretends he’s not blushing) as Chirrut puts a hand to his own forehead, wilting as though he were melting. Baze can see the smirks and poorly-hidden laughter from the other Guardians and staff.

“Yes. I am absolutely the meanest,” Baze deadpans as he flips the lid back onto the steamer. “Go languish in your despair, Chirrut. I’ll find you after these are done.”

(And, later, Chirrut will startle out of his meditation when Baze drops a lumpy, cloth-wrapped bundle into his lap. He will fumble at it with curious fingertips, sense the heat of its contents through the thin barrier, and unwrap it with a growing smile as Baze settles to sit across from him.

“Rescue from my grisly fate – sweet fortune has smiled upon me!” Chirrut will say, careful as he extracts a steamed bun from the bundle. “Tell me, Guardian Malbus, the loathsome, the cruel: was it my good looks that inspired such uncharacteristic charity?” He’ll bob his eyebrows. Baze will, despite himself, find it endearing, even if Chirrut will be looking at him off-center, face turned too far to the right.

“Eat,” Baze will tell him, without putting name to the wordless fondness in his chest that will only flare brighter at Chirrut’s indignant squawk after his first bite, when the other discovers that the heart of the bun is filled with sweet red bean paste instead of meat.

“A just dessert for a child,” Baze will say, and then he will laugh when Chirrut crams the rest of the bun into his mouth all at once, glaring directly at Baze now with his cheeks bulging in lieu of a retort.)

 

* * *

 

“Oh,” Chirrut says suddenly, and it breaks the heavy silence in the ship. Baze pretends to not notice the way the girl – Jyn, Jyn Erso – and the rebel flinch. He half-turns instead to where Chirrut is leaned against him, a slight but solid weight through his armor; he grunts inquiringly as he watches Chirrut fish through the folds of his robe, his walking staff slipped back into the crook of an elbow. Chirrut emerges, triumphant, with a bundle folded in layers of cloth, lifts it up imperiously in reply to Baze’s unspoken question.

“I forgot,” Chirrut says blandly, puts the bundle down in his lap to open. Baze lets his gaze flick up, briefly, to Jyn, to Cassian, to the droid, evaluating, before he looks back down at Chirrut; the steamed buns sit unwrapped in Chirrut’s lap, and the faint smell of them – cooked food and water and bread – wafts into the stale, recycled air of the ship. Baze had made them this morning, as a treat, used some precious water gleaned from the dewcatchers for the steamer basket, for the dough.

His throat briefly tightens and he bends his head down towards Chirrut at it, because like this, with the smell of his cooking in the air and the pressure of Chirrut’s weight at his side, he can almost remember what it had been like on Jedha, remember their dingy little apartment with cracks in the walls, barely large enough for one person, nevermind two. If he closed his eyes, he could almost pretend that he’d managed to coax Chirrut off-world somehow, onto a shuttle bound to someplace _else_ (anywhere else) – but Baze doesn’t close his eyes, because the weight of his armor and blaster are heavy, live things across his shoulders, in his hands, and Chirrut doesn’t belong here in the stale air of a spaceflight shuttle; he cannot reconcile what he senses with his delusions, and his throat swells closed as he remembers, once more, that NiJedha is _gone_. What was left of the Temple. Their shitty little apartment. The market stalls that Baze would stop at daily for groceries, the tools for both their kits, the street corners Chirrut would haunt and the alleys he’d stalk, looking for trouble, and if Baze’s faith were not already a shredded, dry, dead thing in his chest then it would have shattered today at the enormity of their loss. They are – remnants. Refugees. What’s left: he and Chirrut, the pilot and these baozi –

It’s ridiculous. That all their five decades and all the centuries of history in the city and all its people and all the persistent, cold, red sand that invaded every nook and cranny have been reduced to this. Chirrut breaks open one of the buns, splits it in half and offers it up in the direction of Baze’s face.

“Well?” Chirrut says, tone imperious. “Eat. You’ll need your strength.” He stares up at him. Baze looks back – at those blue-silver eyes, down at the food, then back to the man who knows him so well, who had led Baze through those dark months after they lost their brothers and sisters to the Empire. Flicks his eyes away, to Jyn and Cassian, who are both carefully not-watching, now. Bends his head down to bite into the half being offered, shifts to let go of his grip on his blaster (his knuckles creak), and takes what’s left out of Chirrut’s hand.

“You, too,” he calls out to the others, holds Chirrut’s gaze through the man’s faint expression of disbelief, the automatic pout at being told to share (twenty years and more and Chirrut was still a child in the oddest of ways) that flit over his face, before breaking their stare to look at Jyn, Cassian. “Two each. The ones with the five-point top – sweet. The circle is curry. The quarters are meat.” He shifts his weight to stand, clasps Chirrut’s shoulder briefly as the others stare at them, surprised. Squeezes it, once, and Chirrut makes a put-upon noise, clucks his tongue and sighs.

“Fine, fine, very well. Deprive an old man of his simple pleasures,” Chirrut says, to which Baze rolls his eyes, knocking a boot gently against Chirrut’s foot. He crosses the cabin and stops in front of the pilot – Bodhi (the once-Imperial, the _traitor_ , and Baze swallows hard against his closed throat and the memory of the Temple falling, the sound of blaster fire like wet season rain and the texture of blood soaking through rough-spun cloth), is louder than he would be otherwise, and doesn’t mention the way Bodhi flinches anyway when he comes to a stop before him, the other man’s dark eyes clearing as they focus. He is a child of Jedha, too, another thing left behind, and for that and what he’s done in deserting – that is enough. Enough for this. Baze does not _understand_ the bravery of defection, but he _knows_ of it. (Because who is he to speak of bravery in the face of death? It had been him that had dragged Chirrut away from their posts on the day the Temple fell, and it had been him that had left NiJedha behind, unable to bear what it had become, and it was him on the other side of a blaster’s sight, removed from the fight by distance and plexglass.

Baze Malbus knows that he is a coward, but Chirrut never believes him when he says as much, just laughs and smiles too wide in answer.)

“You, too,” Baze grunts, flicks an evaluating eye up and down the huddle of Bodhi’s form before extending a hand, an invitation of help for the other. Bodhi stares at it and then up at him – and then jerks as though suddenly realizing what was being offered, scrambling all limbs and elbows. His grip is strong but clammy, and he is so _light_ when Baze pulls him up, far lighter than Chirrut. Baze lets him go when he finds his feet but doesn’t let him wander far, clasps his fingers around the span of the other’s wrist; Bodhi freezes fullbodied at it, wide eyes finding his. Baze feels skin and bones underneath his grip, the wire of some muscle flexing nervously. He clucks his tongue and lets go.

“Too skinny,” he tells him. “You should eat better now that you’re free. Don’t need to live off of standard rations anymore.” Baze watches the way Bodhi’s eyes go even wider (though at what he couldn’t say), and turns to stump back to Chirrut’s side, surveying what remained of the food as he eats the quarter of the baozi still in his hand. He doesn’t look at the blurring rush of hyperspace outside; he focuses instead on the feeling of Chirrut beside him, on the little, surprised noises of people eating and rediscovering their hunger. Bodhi flits up to them, nervous, and picks two buns (one meat, one sweet), darting a glance to Baze, then Chirrut, as he retreats, bobbing his head in thanks. Chirrut leans into Baze’s side, after, and Baze’s sense of him is dulled by his armor and kit and Chirrut’s robes inbetween, but…

“Eat,” he murmurs to him. Chirrut sighs once, long, before lightly brushing the tops of the buns that remain, seeking, the pads of those clever, callused fingers questing. Chirrut picks up one of the buns and tears it in half, then nudges Baze’s side with his elbow. Baze bends to him, and the backs of Chirrut’s knuckles find the bristle of his beard, use the orienting touch to guide himself the rest of the way as he feeds Baze the half of the baozi in his hand.

Baze bites down. The taste of red bean paste settles behind his teeth. He chews and swallows and imagines himself consuming what was left – what remained of Jedha, taking it into himself to become strength for what would come, for what they will do. It’s not so different, this. Not so unfamiliar. He has stoked the inferno of his rage all these years with the remnants of his broken devotion, after all.

Chirrut kisses him, and his lips are sweet.

Baze eats.


End file.
